[Erowid Note:
Driving while intoxicated, tripping, or extremely sleep deprived is dangerous and irresponsible because it endangers other people. Don't do it!]

I have lived in the bay area my entire life. However, I did not understand how lucky I was for many years to live in such an amazing region until I went on a mandatory family reunion with my parents to the city of Bumfuck, Texas. One single grocery store. One single cinema. No grassy parks with waterfalls and miniature forests in sight. An incredibly diverse selection of restaraunts, ranging from a 'Couldn't Pass a Safety Inspection' Chinese Buffet to a rundown Wendy's. Jesus Christ, how could anybody stand to live in anywhere but the hometown of yours truly? The towering skyscrapers, the supercharged bustle and humdrum of the city at all hours of the day, the car alarms and street music and honking horns and snippets of conversation that penetrate every silent orifice of San Francisco. I love everything about it.

I was very much destined to be a bike messenger upon my graduation from high school. I was smart enough to go to college but not motivated enough to continue to endure the tedious nausea of schoolwork, too much of an adrenaline junkie to work in an office job but too tied down to big cities to become a mountain climber or a parachutist, and too self conscious about being overweight to be a couch potato but too lazy to become a marathon runner. I lived and breathed cycling throughout my high school career, among other activities such as fruitlessly searching clubs for men desperate enough to fuck me and speed-smoking the elevators of multi-million dollar buildings. The game involves walking into an expensive hotel or office building with just enough of an air of confidence so that the security doesn't bother me, then busting my piece and herb out in the nearest elevator and hotboxing it as much as I can before some prick on a security camera finds me and attempts to arrest me. At this point, the game digresses to a combination of 'Tag' and 'Hide and Go Seek'.

So, after graduating from the hell hole that was my high school, I spent the following summer as a dishboy and sandwich maker in a sub shop in downtown San Francisco, until the day that my friend managed to score a job as a bike messenger. They still needed somebody else to fill an empty position. The pay was shit, but so was my sub shop job, so I got myself intentionally fired after spraying my prick of a manager with the dish washing hose and signed on as a bike messenger at a place that I don't care to name. For those of you hicks that live in small towns that dot the barren wasteland known to the rest of us as 'The Middle Third of the United States' and have no idea how big cities work, I'll teach you how bike messengers keep their jobs.

In big cities, cars are fucking everywhere. It's a wonder people still buy them, because they move at approximately the same speed as tortoises with arthritis, are goddamn expensive, and you use up more of your gas tank waiting at stop lights then you do actually driving. And because some people in big cities need packages transported from Point A to Point B in a very short amount of time (faster than the tortoises with arthritis can carry them) these people pay us an exorbitant amount of money to us, bike messengers, to bust our asses to transport said packages from Point A to Point B in a very short amount of time. Then, the company that hires us takes a small finder's fee (approximately 90% of our wages) and gives us our pittance sum of cash that we get for risking our lives on a daily basis.

For those of you that have never biked in a big city, the only way I can describe it to you is a combination of FUCKING INCREDIBLE and GODDAMN FUCKING SCARY, with a hint of BALLS TO THE WALL AWESOME. Cars and pedestrians alike in San Fransisco hate us cyclists, and for good reason. Given the option to actually wait for stop lights to turn green, or for pedestrians to move their fat fucking asses out of the way, most of us just wave our dicks in the wind and masturbate all over conventional traffic laws. If any of you reading this are the towelhead taxi drivers who regularly leave your car horns honking for upwards of ten seconds when I cut you off, or the morbidly obese whales that scream insulting obsceneties at me when I bike past because I scared you so much you almost choked on your 'McWarning: May contain meat' hamburgers, guess what? Up yours too buddy, I'm trying to make a living doing my job, and if it involves me cutting you off and generally fucking you over, better your ass then mine.

Combine this sort of attitude with a religious devotion to psychedelic drugs, which I've maintained since the summer in between my junior and senior years of high school, and you get my life. My DOC is easily acid, because of it's duration, trippiness, cost effectiveness, and the fact that I've got an amazing connect who never runs out and sells me 100 dose vials for $200. I can dose three to five times a week and still make enough money to pay enough of the rent that my roommates don't give a shit. My drug history involves LSD, DMT, psilocybin mushrooms, too many 2C-x's to count (not to mention a few DOx's and #-xxx-DMT's), mescaline, salvia, MDMA, and a few odd stimulants thrown in there for fun. I have tried Adderal and cocaine before, both are terrible drugs and should be erased from the face of the Earth. Fuck stimulants!

Now, it's clear to most people that doing a job like mine while being righteously skull-fucked on a ten strip of acid is a goddamn terrible idea. Yes, you are absolutely right. Without a doubt, I would NEVER recommend to anybody doing what I do on a daily basis. It hasn't ever stopped me, but it's still a goddamn terrible idea. Like the good doctor said, 'I wouldn't recommend... drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me.'

To describe the experience of putting my life in the hands of the San Fransisco Traffic God's while the sky melds together in an amalgous orgasm of blue and magenta and while cars leave such profoundly solid tracers behind them that I can't tell whether they're limousines or not is, essentially, impossible. The experience is just fucking ludicrous. I've been bombing hills at 35 miles an hour before only to have taxi cars open their doors in front of me with only ten feet to brake. I've been within inches of been piledrived by several ton cars in direct oncoming traffic. On one occasion, the quick release on my primary brakes snapped while I hauled ass down one of the steepest streets in the city (which is really saying something, if you've ever been to San Fransisco before), forcing me to simultaneously wedge my foot between my front wheel and my front forks to slow myself down while navigating my bike through two massive four way intersections. I was a half second away from getting anally raped between a bright silver Hummer and a half lime-green/half hot-pink sedan. I suspect that this was not the actual colour of the vehicle.

To do what I do, I have to be paying attention 100% of the time. My peripheral vision and reflexes are my best friends. Acid is not a drug that lends itself to fast reflexes, however; it feels like I have ADHD on higher doses of psychedelics. 'Oh boy, look at that beautiful tree! Gee, don't you just love nature? Holy fuck, the sky! Goddamn, that cloud just turned into two ninjas fighting each other! I love you sky, you're so blue and beautiful.' On my early days of trip-cycling, I would occasionally find myself zoning out for short periods of time, too interested in the patterns on the asphalt below me or the height of the skyscrapers above me to remember that I was in a life or death situation. These sorts of distractions usually ended like this: 'Jesus, look at the floral designs on the pavement, doesn't that just look HOOOOOONK SQUEEEEEEAL FUCK FUCK SHIT FUCK A CAR!!' I haven't had one of those moments in over two years. To be honest, it only happened once or twice. But one or two times of trusting some fuck you've never met before to be paying attention to the road and not his Blackberry or the radio is one or two times two many.

I've since gotten used to getting my shit together on acid. To be honest, though, it's pretty effectively kept me from ever being able to relax on psychedelics, even if I'm not on my bike. When trip-cycling, I have to devote every ounce of my mental capacity to keep my mind on the road and my reflexes. It's a combination of letting my mind trust myself so completely that I don't have to think about hitting that brake fast enough to avoid that taxi door or turning my wheel just enough that I neither plow into that pedestrian OR get clotheslined by that pole, and forcing my mind to be on the edge constantly.

I instantly go into this survival mode when taking psychedelics now, and I can't seem to rewire my brain to just let myself go and relax, even if I'm just sitting on my couch at home tripping. Cause when I'm trip-cycling, I can't mess up or I die. No slipups, no fuckups, no mistakes. I get one chance to make that turn perfectly, and I'm dead if I don't. Making decisions like these for six or eight hours straight on a daily basis leaves me so fucking burned out that it's a wonder I manage to wake up in the morning. I put everything I've got, every last fucking percent into every single moment for more than half my waking day, and I'm supposed to just wake up in the morning and do it all over again for months on end? It baffles me that I do it, but I do, and my body has been forced to adjust.

I've never gotten seriously injured biking before, which is a goddamn miracle. I've crashed a few times before, and I'd hazard a guess that the number of times in was my fault and the number of times it was somebody else's is about equal. No broken bones, no fractured spines, no cracked skulls, nothing. A goddamn miracle. If you ask me, some scrapes and bruises and a snapped spoke or two isn't much to pay for a life like mine. Someday, my miracle is gonna run out though.

I figure that I've got two choices in life right now: I fuck up and die with my head in two and my brains splattered across the street (or at least get so injured that I scare myself away from ever cycling again, which is definitively possible considering how mentally scarring getting in a serious life-threatening accident on acid could be) or I somehow manage to survive being a trip-cycling messenger for long enough that I get older and wiser and figure out that what I'm doing is fucking stupid and I retire. Then, I have to live with the ramifications of dosing large amounts of psychedelics up to five times a week for multiples years on end. I'll be just like one of those burned out hippies on Haight and Ashbury that can't finish a sentence, mumbling to themselves about UFO's and how cheap weed used to be. Oh well; fuck it. It's fun while it lasts, and in a life like mine, some people live and others eat shit and die.

COPYRIGHTS: All reports are copyright Erowid and you agree not to download or analyze the report data without contacting Erowid Center for permission first.
Experience Reports are the writings and opinions of the individual authors who submit them.
Some of the activities described are dangerous and/or illegal and none are recommended by Erowid Center.